Senate panel includes Kivalina school money in budget

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JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — The Senate Finance Committee has advanced its rewrite of the state capital budget, including $43 million for a new school in Kivalina.

The appropriation is meant to satisfy the state's obligation under a 2011 settlement of a lawsuit that alleged inequities in funding for rural public schools. The last of five projects on the settlement list is in Kivalina.

The project was not in the committee's initial rewrite of the bill amid questions about the state's true obligation. Gov. Bill Walker included in his budget proposal $7.1 million toward school design and planning for an access road. Kivalina faces erosion issues, and the community-selected new school site is on higher ground, with no access road to it, according to budget documents.

In a letter to the state education commissioner in January, Charles Wohlforth, the executive director of the group that pursued the case for the plaintiffs, agreed to a phased approach, with conditions, given the state's fiscal situation.

The settlement agreement and consent decree says that a provision allowing for the litigation to be reopened would not be triggered if the Legislature does not fund, or otherwise places contingencies upon the funding of, the construction of a Kivalina school over concerns with erosion or the viability of the school site.

Legislative attorneys Kate Glover and Megan Wallace, in a memo to committee co-chair Sen. Anna MacKinnon, R-Eagle River, said that under the terms, one way to avoid litigation is to decline funding of the project because of concerns with erosion or the site's viability. But they said failure to appropriate any funding does not resolve the state's constitutional obligations.

The settlement agreement listed the project as a school renovation or addition and said the amount of funding would be determined by the state education department's 2013 capital improvement project process. Through that process, the department included Kivalina as a replacement school with a state allocation of $43,237,399, according to the memo. The attorneys wrote that such an appropriation made effective July 1 would likely meet the state's obligations under the decree.

The line item included in the committee rewrite, advanced late Thursday night, allocated $43,237,400.

The attorneys also wrote that under the agreement, the state does not have an obligation to fund a road for the school.

Wohlforth said by email Friday morning that he needed to review the committee's actions but was pleased to see recognition of the legislature's obligation to build the school. He said he was conferring with the plaintiffs' attorney on the road issue.

The committee late Thursday also approved up to $5 million for emergency repairs to the Dalton Highway. The governor's office said Walker on Tuesday declared a state disaster in response to flooding that made the highway impassable.

The Senate is expected to take up the budget for a vote on Saturday. It would then go to the House.

In all, the capital budget, as it stands, totals $1.5 billion, significantly pared back from recent years amid the fall in oil prices and multibillion-dollar deficits the state is facing. The vast majority of the funding would come from the federal government.

The package includes supplemental spending items for the current year, and it would adopt Walker's proposal to remove $52 million in one-time education funding, spread between fiscal year 2016 and 2017. That money had been approved last session.